Month: May, 2013

Perhaps because, in some way, my brother and I tried coming to grips with our father’s death through writing poems, we both wrote about him before writing anything about our mother. Although she isn’t wild about poetry, she is a big fan of her children, so she had heard some of these poems when she came to our readings, the way other mothers go to soccer matches. When Dave asked her if she wanted to read his first full-length poetry manuscript, she noted that, as far as she knew, neither of us had written any poems with her in them. “Do I have to die before I can get into you boys’ poems?” She was laughing that infectious laugh that just bursts out of her, but I heard something else underneath. Since then, we’ve both written poems that include her. Here’s one of mine:

My Mother Cleans

More exacting than graceful,

she does a turn around my kitchen.

The satellite radio plays

“I’ll Never Smile Again,”

and she thinks of dancing,

the way he turned her,

the way he turned her head back then,

some sixty years and a death ago.

Between my stove and microwave,

she manages a neat slide,

leading a mop.

But now, I want to make a little time this Mother’s Day to think about her, in much the same way I thought about my father in my previous post.

To go by appearances, my parents lived a simpler life than most of us live now. They didn’t feel the need to interrogate everything, as I do, or if they did, they would tell you that they had too much to do, what with both of them working outside the home while rearing four children, to sit around gazing at their navels. It isn’t that they never asked the big questions. I remember the relief that came over me when, after attending the fundamentalist church of friends, they returned home talking about how God could possibly have created the world in six days. But even though they seemed willing to be perplexed by the way that question undermined what they’d been taught about God dictating the Bible word for word, they seemed equally willing to let it go after ten minutes in order to get dinner on.

I wonder if that kind of simplicity and practicality contributed to the sense of strength and resilience I saw (and still see) in my mother. Once every year or two, while we were all still living at home, she used to experience back pain severe enough that she simply couldn’t move for a day or two. But, ahead of most doctors of the time, who prescribed prolonged bed rest, she would force herself to get up and move around the minute the pain became bearable. “You just have to push through it,” she would say, “and, besides, I have too much to do; the house needs cleaned, the laundry needs done.”

For nearly thirty years after Dad died, Mom lived on her own—at first, moving back to the rural town where she grew up, then coming back down to the Philadelphia area to be nearer to her children and her newly-arriving grand-children. While up-state, she threw herself into community life, joining The Grange and going to square-dances. A couple of times, she even agreed to have dinner with some widower looking for companionship.

“Do you ever think of actively trying to find someone?” we kids would ask her. She said no, that maybe she was getting like Dave and me, living on her own long enough that she had gotten set in her ways and kind of liked the freedom it gave her. But then her mother, now also a widow, started to fail mentally and physically and, for a few years, lived with my mother who, more and more, had to look after her.

When my mom moved back to Philadelphia, she joined my sister’s church and, six years ago, married a great guy named Dave from her Sunday School class there. I can’t say that, during the thirty years that constituted her second go at single life, she seemed depressed. I can only say that, once she and Dave became a couple, I saw an old buoyancy, one I had forgotten, return. My sister Connie summed it up: “Now, when you talk to her on the phone, she tells you what she and Dave are planning instead of what chores she did that day and how much bananas cost.”

Although the broken road I’ve travelled, with a backpack full of complexity and interrogation, has led me to a wonderful, albeit not always simple, relationship with an amazing woman, my mother seems to have managed a second really good marriage by keeping things simple. Not that things haven’t sometimes been hard.

My stepfather, being my mother’s equal in pragmatism, convinced her a couple of years ago, that they should sell their house and move into a retirement community. You could hear the anguish in my mother’s voice as she talked about the irony of selling or having to give away most of the things “you work so hard to get.” I’d say it took her most of the first year in her new home to adjust to downsizing from a house to a one-bedroom apartment, but it’s like my sister said about the bananas. Yes, she will still talk about what dessert she’s making for their Bible Study group or how she needs to straighten up their place, but why shouldn’t she? She loves something about homemaking. It’s just that now, instead of fretting about getting the roof repaired, she’s talking about all the concerts they’re going to and how their shuffle-board team is doing. Between card games and shuffle-board tournaments and activities at their church, with a few doctor visits thrown in, it can challenge me to find a date when they’re free to get together.

As I write this, they’re in Nashville, visiting my sister Connie, who moved there with her family when her husband changed jobs. Mom and Dave drove there. They say that they may not continue to drive such long distances after this trip, but I love that they are 88 and still going strong. I don’t doubt that, while they’re there, Mom is pitching in with the laundry and they are both helping out at Nucci’s, the family restaurant Connie and Steve started.

I really like telling people the story of Mom and Dave. It seems to spark everyone’s hopefulness. I know from my friends who are significantly younger than I that seeing me live a rich, active life of curiosity and connection at 61 makes them feel much less bleak about aging. I can thank my mother, and now my stepfather, for doing what the poet Louis MacNeice, in his poem “Leaving Barra,” called “living like a fugue and moving.” MacNeice continues with these lines which seem made for the two of them:

I’m still going to write about discovering the song, “Hero” by Family of the Year. But I always label my journal entries by date, and when I typed today’s date, I flew away from the particulars of that song, back to May 2, 1978–a morning equal in beauty to this morning– the day my father died.

Yes, thirty-five years. It’s enough distance that I can muse on how 35 is the reverse of his age when he died. It’s enough distance that I can say factoids like lung cancer, oxygen mask, 8-month battle, 3 in the morning. And then the factoids run out, leaving the murkier feelings that require more words that still can’t quite get at things: the crinkling of a body bag as a man is maneuvered around corners like a piece of furniture, a cry like none I’d ever heard before from deep down my mother’s throat, the discombobulation of time—far away people suddenly arriving after an interminable wait, the heat and birdsong that promised so much for summer, and our next-door neighbors, Bonnie and Craig Sheets, giving the simplest, most genuine expression of sympathy as they stood just inside our screen door saying, over and over, thoughtfully and dumbfounded, “We’re so sorry.”

All of us in my family eventually moved on, just as my father moved on from World War II and from the surprise of finding out that his twin boys were blind. I was lucky to have had a dad who occasionally talked about his philosophy of life, and even luckier to have had one who then lived it. He said he went to church because it made him a better person. He loved and honored his father, but simply made a decision, lying in bed as a young boy, hearing his drunken father beat up his mother, never to treat a woman like that. He openly told our friends, “Any friend of my children is always welcome in this house.” He believed in keeping music in his life and romance in his marriage. He told us to move on with our lives after he died.

And so I did. I carry what I can of him with me. Still, on days like this, I look back, which brings me to the song. “I don’t want to be your hero, I don’t want to be a big man,” it says. It’s true, my father could have used a little more sense of himself as a hero. It’s also true that dying, in part from breathing platinum dust for fifteen years in a factory, where the owners cared more about capturing the precious metal residue that washed off employees in forced showers than they cared about providing adequate air filtering, can make you feel like a “little guy.” But the good part of him not thinking of himself as a hero was that he never postured as one; he just lived it naturally. (It’s probably the best example I got of the writer’s motto to “show, don’t tell.”)

When I first heard “Hero,” it didn’t take me back to my father. It took me to the early part of college, that time when I wanted so much to find attachment to a woman, yet struggled with how I could have that and keep my independence. It was a conflict that, I believe, came partly through my father, who told me and my brother that it would take a very special sighted woman to hitch her dreams to a blind guy for life. That hurt me and it set me back. Yet, other times, he would say things like, “Don’t let anyone stop you. If you think you want to do it, go do it.”

He was a man of some conflict, and I love him for that, too. He taught me something about complexity. “Cripes,” he would say of our neighbor on the other side, “that guy can read Winnie-the-Pooh in Latin, but he can’t fix his own lawn mower.” And yet, nobody ever beamed with more pride than my father the day my brother and I graduated from college.

He could have gone to college, but turned it down because, after putting his life on hold for the war, he couldn’t wait for the joy and responsibility of marriage and family. Like the singer of “Hero,” I was nowhere near ready for that kind of responsibility when I reached college age. I sometimes wonder if he envied my open options and the luxury of my extended time to get an education. If he did, I never knew it. No, from the things he said and the way he lived, I got the message he never wanted me to hold back from going after the life I wanted, no matter how different it might be from his. I got the idea he wanted me to have the fullest life I could have. That’s why, when I hear this song these thirty-five years after his death, I can imagine us driving with the windows down, the promise of summer in our hair and all around us, and him smiling, singing along with me to the radio: “We can whisper things, secrets of our American dreams. … Everyone has the right to walk with everyone else.”